Ys X: Nordics Review (Switch)

Though the Ys series has been around for decades now (it even predates Final Fantasy), its release history in the West was rather inconsistent until the mid-2000s and the series only really became relevant again to the Nintendo fanbase with the release of Ys VIII in 2018. After a decent follow-up a few years ago with Ys IX, Falcom has now opted to squeeze out one more new entry for the Switch before its much-awaited successor inevitably steals the spotlight. Ys X: Nordics provides yet another strong, enjoyable adventure for Adol and Dogi, effortlessly demonstrating that there’s still a lot of life left in this long-running franchise.

Ys X places you once again in the shoes of the famed red-haired adventurer Adol Christin, who’s travelling with his friends Dogi and Dr. Flair to Celceta to help the doctor with some restorative flowers research. The group is travelling by boat through the Obelia Gulf, but are soon accosted by some Normans—a seafaring group of local enforcers who both maintain order and bully locals. Adol and his party end up landbound after the conflict, but his woes worsen when a Norman leader named Karja attempts to duel Adol on the beach and the two become inseparably bound together by a pair of magical ‘Mana Cuffs’ that they can’t remove.

They soon learn that they alone have the power to fight back against the mysterious Greigr, a race of monsters that threatens to overwhelm the Obelia Gulf and all who live there—Normans included. Left with no other choice, Adol and Karja set out on a quest to thwart the Greigr threat, hopefully learning along the way both how to work together. And how to get those blasted cuffs off.

As in past Ys games, the story here is hardly the main draw, but it checks all the requisite boxes it. Karja is a great addition as a co-lead — she plays well into the ‘frenemy’ dynamic with Adol and has a tomboyish personality that gradually reveals there’s much more to her than just being a local bully. As for the rest of the supporting cast, most are quite forgettable and one-note (perhaps with the main exception of Dogi), but the heavy reliance on tired tropes gives Ys X a sort of corny charm that does just enough to keep you from immediately skipping the cutscenes. We doubt anyone would argue that this is among the finest RPG plots, but it’s certainly ‘good enough’ to keep the game moving.

Gameplay follows the open-ended and action-focused template of its many predecessors, but there are some key additions and changes to make this one feel more like a fresh start. For one, rather than tasking you with exploring a large, interconnected map, you’re instead given a boat called the Sandras and allowed to navigate an open ocean dotted with islands. These seafaring portions of the gameplay loop reminded us quite a bit of Assassin’s Creed IV, right on down to finding crafting materials floating in the waves and navigating the somewhat awkward ship-to-ship battles.

The ship battles are rather exciting at first, but the novelty wears off with time as repetition and the sluggish controls start to hamper the experience. Still, you can upgrade the ship with new weapons and higher stats, doing just enough to keep the battles and sense of progression feeling worthwhile. Meanwhile, it can be pretty fun to navigate to new islands and explore the ocean, but the ship is so slow for the first several hours and the ocean a little too devoid of things to do while travelling between destinations.

Sailing is a bit of a mixed bag, then, but we enjoyed how it spices up the gameplay loop and helps to meaningfully set Ys X apart from its predecessors.

Once you drop anchor and set foot on land, things unfold more closely to the last few Ys games, with one key difference. Gone are the multiple playable party members - now you can only play as either Adol, Karja, or both simultaneously. While playing as either character, your partner will be controlled by AI and fighting other enemies, but holding down the right trigger will activate Duo Mode and allow you to fight as both, which gives you access to some powerful team-up skills and effectively doubles your damage output.

We enjoyed the strategic depth that Duo Mode offers, as there are special enemy attacks that dictate you must either be separate or together to avoid damage, but we felt that Duo Mode was a bit unbalanced, especially on lower difficulty levels. It’s almost always the right choice to fight exclusively with that right trigger held down due to all the advantages it brings, and this can tend to make fighting as either character individually feel rather unsatisfying.

Still, whether you’re fighting solo or duo, Ys X certainly does a great job of delivering that fast and satisfying combat that the series has become known for. Deftly dodging attacks while mopping up mobs with sword slashes and well-timed skill activations is simple fun, and the power ramp feels perfectly judged as you're gradually granted more tools and harder-hitting attacks. Though the action here doesn’t hit the same kind of technical depth that you’d find in a more specialised release like Bayonetta or Astral Chain, Ys X reminds us yet again that this series features some of the finest action combat one can find in an RPG.

Out of combat, Adol and Karja’s exploration of the overworlds and dungeons is bolstered by a small and growing collection of abilities that open new pathways and almost introduce a soft Metroidvania element to the oop. Things like a mana rope that lets you grapple across gaps or a surfboard that lets you shoot across bodies of water are a lot of fun to toy around with, and they help to make the environments feel more diverse and creative with their layouts and obstacles.

Especially on the more story-relevant islands, there’s a lot of stuff to ferret out as you explore, and this isn’t even considering the mountain of side content you can tackle along the way. Things like character subquests for deepening your relationships with the supporting cast and enemy base raids that see you clearing a path to land your boat before storming a fortress on foot help to expand the world of the Obelia Gulf and make it feel more lived in, while giving you diverse tasks to fulfil if you don’t feel like rushing to the next story objective right away. You’re always sufficiently rewarded for your efforts, which helps maintain a great sense of forward momentum.

Adol and Karja can of course receive the typical upgrades to skills and equipment, but the main thing differentiator is a cool take on a stat tree called the Release Line. With this, Adol and Karja each have a small constellation of interconnected nodes, and each one can hold a ‘Mana Seed’ that you either craft, find, or receive as a reward. Different seeds will bolster different stats by a few points once placed, while seeds that are the same colour will generate a passive effect as long as they’re placed adjacent to each other.

It’s an easy-to-learn system that feels like a more forgiving version of the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X, and it gives you a lot of agency to build each character to different specifications. Though Adol and Karja may level up together, the mana constellations that are unlocked for each are different shapes, and this combined with the somewhat limited supply of Mana Seeds means that you can’t easily build them in exactly the same way. We appreciated the depth that the Release Line brings to character progression, especially after you’re several hours in and have a lot more options to experiment with.

As for its visuals, Ys X feels like a modest improvement over its predecessors, although some issues remain. This is the first Ys game to be built on Falcom’s new game engine (which was partially made with the Switch hardware in mind) and the results do show some key benefits. Loading screens are a lot less frequent now and the character models themselves are noticeably sharper, although the overall resolution looks a bit muddy and the frame rate still struggles to stay at a consistent 30fps. Despite the issues, we’d still say this is the best-looking and best-performing entry in the series on Switch to date.

These visuals are then supported by a great soundtrack that manages to fuse the series’ penchant for high-energy rock music with more sweeping and adventurous tunes that continue the clear Scandinavian inspiration of Ys X. We’re not sure if we’d yet claim this as the best Ys soundtrack — Ys VIII is seriously hard to beat — but this one is certainly up there.